You may think you know your customer, but what is your understanding based on? Contributor Evan Magliocca lays out some of the ways brands' insights fall short.

I hate to break it to you, but you don’t know your customers as well as you think you do. A marketer’s understanding of a customer is usually an ideal view pushed by the brand team — an aspirational view that everyone believes. This couldn’t be farther from the truth.

You may even be able to spit out stats like average order value, or units per transaction, but that knowledge is narrow, the insights are few and the result is overconfident marketing built on a foundation of self-fulfilling, internal Kool-Aid drinking that completely misses connection and alignment with real customers.

We have to break down that wall before we can move forward. It’s important to consider what you actually know to be fact and why you know it. It’s easy for a spouted statistic to become a brand commandment, or for a survey that provides a complete and holistic view of your customer to quickly become the concrete and unassailable truth. So how do you separate fact from fiction?

About The Author

Evan Magliocca leads Baesman’s brand direction, content strategy, communications and product partnerships. Previously, Evan served as a digital strategist for Abercrombie & Fitch Co., where he managed site marketing, seasonal planning and digital initiatives for the A&F brands. Evan graduated from Ohio University with a B.S. in Journalism and a specialization in public relations.